India's rural households continued to remain financially excluded prominently compared to urban households particularly with respect to their access to institutional credit. Nearly half (44%) of the credit requirements of rural households is still met through non-institutional sources of finance...

The relationships between energy, the environment, and development are deep and complex. The International Energy Agency has noted that energy is deeply implicated in each of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of human development. Energy services provide an essential input to...

Protecting the entitlements of some inherently requires preventing others from claiming and controlling those same resources. Yet much recent research regarding property rights and economic development treats the level of property rights security in a country as homogeneous. This one-dimensional...

Using a new set of indicators that measure the Property Insecurity of ethnopolitical minority groups, I find that Property Insecurity is not correlated with the Risk of Expropriation facing foreign investors and domestic elites – revealing that the aggregate measures of 'institutional quality'...

The media narratives with respect to EU external policies and their effects on developing countries generally paint a picture of unequal power dynamics and negative externalities, particularly with respect to international trade and land grabbing. In this paper, I use trade data to argue that...

This paper studies the incidence of civil war over time. We put forward a canonical model of civil war, which relates the incidence of conflict to circumstances, institutions and features of the underlying economy and polity. We use this model to derive testable predictions and to interpret the...

Uncertainty about the export earnings accruing to a country (sometimes referred to as export instability) is an important source of macroeconomic uncertainty in many developing countries. Theory predicts that countries should react to increases in this form of uncertainty by increasing their...

Developing countries that experience commodity booms struggle to mobilize sustainable tax revenues. Emerging literature on the subject notwithstanding, there is limited exploration of the specific types of institutions critical for improving fiscal capacity in resourcerich contexts. This paper...

This paper provides theoretical and empirical insights into the puzzling simultaneous rise in foreign direct investment inflows in Africa and capital flight from the continent over the past decades. Indeed, paradoxically, even as African countries have become more attractive to foreign private...